Silver Sands Beach

Moments of Noticing

I tap the alarm off at 5:00, click on the lamp, then swing my feet to the floor as I mutter a barely audible thank you. Pilgrimage awaits. Sunrise in Milford, CT, on the heels of Daylight Savings Time and just days before the spring equinox, is a little before 7:00, but a few things need my attention before I head out for the one hour drive to the shore.

Being a creature of habit has its advantages, and one ritual to which I’ve held pretty fast is to turn soul-ward at the outset of each day — preferably addressed before the mind-altering effects of coffee, but definitely before emails, internet, and all the distractions that will likely follow, quotidian or otherwise. This is sacred time. Even (maybe especially) as I walked the all-consuming pilgrimages of Spain, to be quiet and at the taproots of humanity, primal and essential, has seemed the only way to commence. It’s how life unfolds anyway — the interior has primacy. As within, so without.

Before folding into contemplation, I read, and do so aloud. Using the voice implies worship and helps orient a befogged mind, even though it will soon fade to a whisper and ultimately leave words entirely to favor silence. Two of the books I read from daily are written by one through whom the Teacher appears. My choice is, at least superficially, rather odd given my strong leanings toward Eastern thought, but somehow, time spent each morning with Thomas Merton’s Thoughts in Solitude and New Seeds of Contemplation, has led me to a greater understanding of the unity of the inner and outer worlds. Despite my being a cradle Catholic and long estranged from the religion and its theology, I have found this monk to be a way shower, an enduring sage, most certainly a mystic. He is my recurring reminder that to be born into a given sect does not preclude exploring alternatives along the way. To know of his life is to know he felt the same.

In his inimitable, direct way, Thomas informs me that I have no idea where I’m going, that the road ahead is obscured, and that just because I think I’m living a spiritually centered life, it does not necessarily follow that I’m actually doing so. He has the temerity to suggest I am innately delusional (a pretty safe bet). He goes on to write that the things to avoid are the aforementioned distractions, and the way to this is to live a life in which all I touch, and all that touches me, becomes a prayer — from the elements of the earth to the experiences of the day ahead, the beings I encounter, and the intricacies of relationships; it is all a prayer. If I were able to hold to this, what then could distract me? It would all belong, and precisely as it is.

I become quiet, time passes, and soon morning devotion is over.

It’s off now to sunrise, for if ever there was a prayer...

***

It is the seeming power of planetary events such as sunrise and sunset and phases of the moon that so apprehends us. An entire world turns on its axis, and from a single point of view its source of light is revealed; days begin and end, tides wash in, tides wash out, the repercussions of it all are as infinite as all that is even possible.

And yet, there is a simple isness that pervades everything. The world itself is a movement and so everything changes. But beyond a display of the immense and incomprehensible power of the cosmos, underneath that appearance is an exquisite reality of ineffable stillness and silence and innocence. A sunrise like today’s bears witness to this notion.

Filtered through the dark clouds of yesterday’s storms that are still meandering eastward and now maybe 30 or 40 miles distant, today’s sunrise is a restrained affair — its light is dusky, more an insinuation. This morning’s first light leans notably toward allowing the clouds their due. Moments pass beyond the time I know dawn has breached the invisible horizon, but then, warm and creamy, the sun finally lifts above the gunmetal gray as a near afterthought, unspectacular.

***

Here at Silver Sands Beach, an ebb tide will slowly reveal the sand bar that connects to Charles Island, a little over a half mile offshore. At the lowest tide, the walk out from the beach is dry and easy. But this morning, the land bridge rises only partially out of the water, still submerged closest to the island, and a large colony of seagulls, whose domain I dare not challenge by walking out too far, is feeding on the snails found among the small rocks and in the sand of the intertidal zone. To notice this is to be humbled and softened, deprived of cynicism.

I consider often that life is pilgrimage and pilgrimage is life. The art of both is to walk in knowing that what is found along the way is worthy of being noticed, that its meaning is self-determined, and that what the body’s mind does with these things is sacred, unique as each dawn. In moments like these, my default is to suspend the human agenda and bow to allowing, holding the all of it in simple, wide-eyed wonder. Only then am I able to have the slightest idea of what is being divulged.

Now, on this new and lovely day, I am left then to stroll the beach in the good company of a forthright breeze, fair and gentle waves, the sun arcing through a clearing sky, and some gulls, which I am grateful to know are unaware of me and feeding undisturbed.

Peace,

Stephen